ReadFanon

This might be old news but it's kinda wild to me.

You might remember Doug Lain from being the publishing manager when Zero Books rose to prominence, back when Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher made a big splash way back when. He moved on to Sublation Media and seems to be doing roughly the same schtick after Zero got taken over by a different parent publisher. (History seems to rhyme for Doug, getting put into his position at Zero Books with the ouster of the old crew when John Hunt took over only for Watkins Media to take over John Hunt, ingloriously booting Lain out in the process.)

Doug has always been a part of the sorta eclectic post-New Left cultural critique, in that milquetoast style of BreadTube broad left "YouTube Killed The TV Star: Adorno, Benjamin, and the desolate media landscape of late capitalism" or "One-Dimensional Marvel: Marcuse and the MCU" style of slop. Y'know, the stuff where it's super pretentious and yet deeply tailist of pop culture trends with a smattering of a couple of the quotes from the key text referenced in the title, the same one that every textbook and every first-year student quotes, in order to give the impression that it's super serious marxist critique when it's actually just 20-60 minutes of anti-capitalist bellyaching combined with the latest fad.

Yeah, that sort of stuff. He's good buddies with Ben Burgis who is a hack that has been trying to position himself as the patron philosopher-saint of the progressive-to-socialish left for years now, to little avail.

Welp, turns out that Doug had Peter Coffin on for an interview a month ago here, where he's uncritically buying into the whole "woke ideology" narrative and all buddy-buddy with Coffin, who is Caleb Maupin's #1 fan (turns out that Peter Coffin isn't handling the divorce well). And apparently Doug has been doing some livestreams on Midwestern Marx and MAGA communism (I thought they abandoned that name, but Doug doesn't really have his finger on the pulse tbh) and he has an upcoming stream on Maupin and Coffin. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to stomach multiple hours of livestreams from Doug Lain about PatSocs and Midwestern Marx to get a read on what his position is.

In one respect this development is totally on-brand for Lain, to be chasing whatever audience and principles be damned (the Angela Nagle bullshit didn't faze him - doesn't matter; sold copies, he was quite comfortable hanging out with the stupidpol crowd on Reddit too) but in another respect, his frequent collaborator Ben Burgis has always played at sheepdog to the left by policing the limits to radical left discourse and positioning himself as anti-authoritarian and buying into that anti-communist paradigm so it's kind of a weird pivot.

I think Peter Coffin's angle is pretty apparent - he's just courting a legitimate publisher so that a ghostwriter can do some turd-polishing for whatever he manages to draft, sparing him the indignities of having to self-publish next time around.

But it's still weird to me. Maybe they're proving horseshoe theory true and making a connection between the libertarian faux left of people like Lance from The Serfs, Beau of The Fifth Column, and Ben Burgis with the authoritarian faux left like MWM, Maupin, and Coffin where Doug Lain is the connecting point between those two trends. I guess if they're all on different grifts, and they are, then this would explain how it all fits together neatly.

But on the other hand idk. It feels like the online discourse on the left is reaching a weird inflection point. You have Gabriel Rockhill and his Critical Theory Workshop, Rockhill being closely associated with PSL and someone who should know better, courting the MWM audience. Then you have Doug Lain, who should also know better although I'm not surprised if he doesn't give a damn, doing a similar thing and he's broadening out to openly PatSoc audience and not just confining himself to the crypto-PatSoc MWM audience. It's giving Strasserist vibes tbh.

Luckily it's online and not the real world, I guess?

It's gonna be a really awkward moment when Hinkle, Haz, Maupin, Coffin, and MWM drop the pretense and finally jump the shark to become openly fascist, perhaps taking some of these courtiers with them. Imagine having the tankies screaming for years on end about these clowns being fascist in all but name and orbiting Larouchite cutouts with nobody listening because "tankie redfash", only for this position to be vindicated eventually. Though if history is any guide, those SocDems are gonna find themselves chanting PatSoc slogans side-by-side with the likes of Hinkle, Haz, Eddie and Peter to own the tankies:

We live in interesting times.

Interesting times ahead.

I was wondering what you all see happening from this point and what sort of timeframes you think these things will play out on.

Idk about the whole "127 variations" thing and tbh I'm deeply skeptical about it - I reckon that's just a way of selling a course tbh.

But aside from that and the brief shilling segment in the middle, this video is a really thorough look at ADHD across its presentation, symptoms, treatment options with decent consideration for neurophysiology and neurochem etc. in about as succint a video as I've ever come across.

I think a lot of clinicians don't dig deep enough into the span of symptoms of ADHD and this might be a good starting point for folks with ADHD or people who think they might have it to begin discussions with their doctors, especially if you are dealing with difficult symptoms or side effects.

Some bits might go over your head unless you're a nerd for this stuff but I can find some other videos or I can do my best to explain but even if you don't fully understand every part of this video I reckon you'll still find some useful information in it.

(It's also kinda vindicating because I occasionally talk about conditions that aggravate ADHD or which can mimic it - sleep disturbances, anaemia, problems with hormone levels etc. so it's nice to see this stuff getting mentioned and it's validating to see a qualified psychiatrist talking about this because it means I'm not a total crackpot.)

[CW: for all the typical heavy metal health stuff]

I think this is going to be more of a vent post than anything. I'm not expecting anyone to provide me with a comment that will be a watershed moment for me.

Here's the backdrop:

I was caught in a bad long-term relationship and didn't know it.

A had a crisis of political beliefs that really shook my worldview to its foundations because what I thought I knew about things and the way that I understood and moved in the world was all through that political lens.

I had been dealing with poor mental health since forever but I reached a turning point where I finally acknowledged that I was autistic, which again shook my worldview because it was a massive shift in I thought I knew about myself and my interpersonal relationships, as well as my relationship to myself.

I got a curveball diagnosis of ADHD along the way, and one of the things that they don't tell you when you start on ADHD meds as an adult is that you can expect your relationships to others to change and that often if you have a bad relationship, ADHD meds can be the catalyst for change there. They also don't tell you if you have a significant history of trauma, especially if it hasn't been processed, that when you start ADHD meds your brain is going to find itself with a whole lot more presence and a whole lot of reserves so you're probably going to start dredging up and processing that old trauma whether you like it or not.

As I got things together and found some of the right meds, my long-term relationship deteriorated. I started to keep track of things a lot better and this helped me to realise what was really going on in the relationship.

Anyway, shit got really bad with my ex engaging in medical abuse, using the cops as leverage (e.g. physically assaulting me and then calling the cops on me) and lots of stuff like that.

I was already burnt out before she started becoming openly abusive of me. I didn't have anyone that I could fall back on for support. I was preparing to become homeless and to live out of my car, until my ex stole it. The stronger and more independent I got, the more of a threat that was to my ex and the worse the abuse got. Those who do not move do not notice their chains, and all that.

And meanwhile the ADHD meds were working pretty well but they were also making me much more prone to full-blown anxiety and I was processing old trauma while getting fresh trauma heaped on me. I needed them to be able to get my shit together but I desperately needed to not take them because for as much as they were helping me, they were also making things that much harder too.

Anyway, I get out of the situation and I start again basically from scratch. Except I have a pile of trauma to deal with, even more than before.

By this point I had been redlining it for a very long time and I was so focused on survival that my mental health went to shit. I started suffering bouts of catatonia and I had to rely on myself to figure out what was going on and to ascertain the cause of it, without knowing what it was. That took a heroic effort on my part because I was dealing with really intense suicidality, trying to work through the trauma, trying to rebuild my life, and between all of that I was getting pummeled by these periods where I was barely able to care for myself in the most basic ways. Then I had to try and scrape together whatever was left over to determine the etiology of these mysterious bouts where I was debilitated -I had to catalogue all of the symptoms and potential triggers and then I had to make a list of causes and to eliminate the easiest and most likely ones until I figured out what was happening to me.

And there was stuff that had to be dealt with in the court system and with police and other government agencies because my ex did shit behind the scenes like committing fraud in my name and stealing restricted meds (think Schedule II if you are in the US) and having to report this to the police because otherwise the risk was that my ex would have these meds with my name on the prescription and that this could possibly be used to either cause me legal trouble or that I could get my authority to be prescribed those meds rescinded because there was "evidence" of me giving them to others/selling them. I hate dealing with the cops but it was a situation where I couldn't afford to risk my access to the meds and I couldn't let my ex exploit this potential vulnerability if the theft wasn't reported immediately. So I had to compromise on my principles. Hooray! 🎉

Anyway, I determine that the most likely candidate for those debilitating bouts is catatonia and so I scrape whatever I can into researching this for myself. I had to do a medication review for myself because I suspected that some meds were aggravating the suspected catatonia because if you go to a pharmacist or doctor and request a medication review because you suspect you're catatonic they're going to look at you like you're completely unhinged.

Stuff falls into place and the catatonia hypothesis fits - it explains some anomalous responses to other meds and it has a lot of explanatory power.

I make my case to my psychiatrist but unfortunately the gold standard for diagnosing and treating catatonia is the lorazepam challenge (a benzo) and I didn't want to come off as drug-seeking so I had researched alternatives to this and had a breakthrough with treatment when I requested a different drug to use as a trial. A couple more positive responses to the drugs and taking them once when I wasn't catatonic, yielding a completely opposite response, made the catatonia diagnosable.

I get through the legal stuff. I start dealing with managing the difficult side effects from the ADHD meds through the same sorta process as above, except it required more of a self-inflicted crash course in psychopharmacology. My life becomes stable.

And since that point I've been so, so pervasively tired. I was ready to give up before any of all this shit started.

I'm dealing with immense (autistic) burnout coupled with crippling depression and it's hard because half of the advice for dealing with depression is contradicted by half of the advice for dealing with burnout and vice versa and because I just don't have the energy to do much or to make positive changes in my life, so I feel completely hamstrung.

The things that give my life meaning are hard to participate in because I am very often too tired to engage with them.

I have to swallow my outrage at the state of the world because I am mostly incapable of contributing towards change (e.g. going to rallies for Palestine.)

I almost never have the energy and focus to read and so I'm basically stuck in a holding pattern with regards to resolving my internal crisis of political beliefs until I'm able to sit down and go back over the things that I had read with a strong ideological bias.

Rebuilding interpersonal relationships is difficult because it's hard for me to be consistent at all and I just end up turning down invitations to do things because I don't have the capacity most of the time, and it's just plain hard for me on account of the fact that I'm autistic. Also it's hard because I'm exhausted and miserable, so it feels like a choice between bringing all of that to a friendship (which is a huge downer) or putting on an act to give people the impression that I'm fine (which makes me feel inauthentic and it tends to aggravate my feelings of isolation.) It's probably obvious but my trust is pretty broken too so this adds a layer of difficulty.

Rebuilding a positive sense of self is really difficult for me because my ex exploited my vulnerabilities, on account of being multiply-neurodivergent, and it's hard to feel anything but regret and resentment towards being the way that I am.

I barely have the energy to take care of my basic needs let alone to do anything else and I'm so anhedonic that even if I do have the energy to do something that I used to enjoy, I get nothing from it and then I just feel the need to grieve the loss of a thing that used to make my life enjoyable.

It's hard to find the will to persevere, especially when all of the things that could help me get well are out of reach to me and it feels like I've reached an absolute impasse.

I'm just so tired.

Title is the epiphany. Story as follows:

There's a fairly new neighbour that has moved in next to me. They are outgoing and extroverted in that needy or demanding way whereas for me as an autistic person, I'm much more self-contained and don't seek out idle chit-chat with acquaintances because I honestly don't need it in my life and I don't reap any benefit from it.

Anyway, there has been a few odd conversational topics that have arisen multiple times over the course of our interactions and with one of them it got to the point where I've thought to myself "What the fuck is up with their preoccupation with this topic? I'm sick of talking about this." and, upon reflection, I realised that they were insinuating themselves into a situation that they are completely oblivious to, that isn't their business, and that isn't a concern whatsoever.

I don't want to explain exactly what it is because it's pretty identifying info but think along the lines of someone "casually" mentioning that the soil your cacti are living in is very dry - yeah it really is, what of it?

Anyway once the penny had (finally) dropped for me that this person doing that weird Boomerish thing where they repeatedly drop mention of something like how nice the weather is today and they expect that you're going to understand that they're trying to suggest that you should mow the lawn today (a legit post that someone made on social media but maybe it was about mowing the lawn or maybe it was about putting the washing out - I forget the specifics), I turned this over in my mind and came to the conclusion in the post title above:

They are literally treating interactions with me like it's a chess match. They are making conversational manoeuvres in an attempt to force a particular response out of me. You don't do that sort of thing with a person unless you see them as an adversary. If you are gonna treat me like an adversary then we are not friends and I have no obligation to extend my goodwill towards you.

(On a tangent, this is the reason why I have a strong dislike of the Socratic Method - because it essentially treats people as your conversational adversaries.)

This is the newest development in my experience of unmasking and growing beyond my people-pleasing so I thought I would share this realisation with others.

Never thought I'd see it happen. Not sure which original members are going to be part of the reboot. More news to come I guess?

...because I'll never be him